foreign aid

Development aid (also development assistance, international aid, overseas aid or - especially in the US - foreign aid) is aid given by developed countries to support economic development in developing countries. It is distinguished from humanitarian aid as being aimed at alleviating poverty in the long term, rather than alleviating suffering in the short term.

The term "development aid" is often used to refer specifically to Official Development Assistance (ODA), which is aid given by governments on certain concessional terms, usually as simple donations. It is given by governments through individual countries' international aid agencies and through multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, and by individuals through development NGOs such as Care International or Oxfam.

Quantity

Over the last 20 years, annual ODA has been between $50bn and $60bn. The United States is the world's largest contributor of ODA in absolute terms ($15.7 billion, 2003), but the smallest among developed countries as a percentage of its GDP (0.14% in 2003). The UN target for development aid is 0.7% of GDP; currently only five countries (with Norway in the lead with 0.92%) achieve this.

However, private contributions also make a significant, albeit harder to track, contribution to development aid. Private donations in the United States, for example, are estimated to be at least $34 billion dollars a year, broken down as such:

• International giving by US foundations: $1.5 billion per year
• Charitable giving by US businesses: $2.8 billion annually
• American NGOs: $6.6 billion in grants, goods and volunteers.
• Religious overseas ministries: $3.4 billion, including health care, literacy training, relief and development.
• US colleges scholarships to foreign students: $1.3 billion
• Personal remittances from the US to developing countries: $18 billion in 2000

It is this last figure, remittances, that blurs many definitions of aid: for example, money sent home by foreign workers is counted in this sum. The exact result and effect of remittance money is of some debate: however, even if it is factored out private donations still match ODA in the US. In many cases privately donated money is spent much more effectively than ODA, which must go through various governmental layers before reaching the problem. However, in other cases private sums disappear completely without any trace of their existence. Unfortunately, private aid figures are not tracked so well as ODA in many countries, so it is difficult to make across-the-board comparisions between various nations.

External links

• OECD Development Co-operation Directorate (DAC)
• AiDA: Accessible Information on Development Activities
• Håkan Malmqvist (2000), "Development Aid, Humanitarian Assistance and Emergency Relief", Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Sweden [1]
• Andrew Rogerson with Adrian Hewitt and David Waldenberg (2004), "The International Aid System 2005–2010 Forces For and Against Change", ODI Working Paper 235 [2]
• "The US and foreign aid assistance" [3]
• Millions Saved A compilation of case studies of successful foreign assistance by the Center for Global Development.

See also

• Millennium Development Goals
• conditionality
• aid effectiveness
• Debt relief
• Millennium challenge account